Been awhile… here’s a quick update on what’s been happening with me over the past 5 weeks: ?
I celebrated a b-day at @canggucamp308

We had our first ever entirely-virtual @charitymakeover_ and our volunteers proved that these events are indeed possible to execute entirely remotely. There’s a great recap video as the last post on our blog if you’re interested to see what kind of stuff our volunteers were able to build in a day.

Canggu has started to re-open but with fairly intense rules. Banning hugs…okay but banning stories seems pretty heavy-handed.

Our group is fostering the tiniest kitten on earth. His name is “Tiger” and he is our watchcat guarding our workspace.

We celebrated another b-day (we’re getting to be pro’s at this).

It’s now planting season here in Bali which means farmers are mostly done lighting their fields on fire and instead are now just watering them intensely. The geckos here are having nightly feasts on every imaginable flying insect. I’m pretty sure the geckos will be bigger than the kitten soon.

The evenings here are pretty magical. It’s windy season and any given evening at dusk there will be dozens of these massive black kites in the air- some nearly a mile up. They don’t do the Kiterunner fighting thing – they just hover stationary but it’s beautiful.

I’ve been on a tear lately having read these four books. At some point I’ll do a blog post summary of each.

We had last night an amazing dinner with some amazing humans- Arthur of FasterToMaster.com, Erin of arenastrength.com and @_rachelcrocker_ of RachelCrocker.com

Rest assured friends while I’m staying mostly fit I am still doing my part to rid the world of desserts one cheesecake at a time. So far so good. Hope everyone is happy & healthy. (at Pererenan Beach)

So much for weekly updates… For the first time in 5mos I don’t have any spectacular photos to share. My weekly highlight lately is catching up with my folks via zoom.

I’m in week 6 of the Faster To Master program and I highly recommend. I had interviewed Arthur Worsley as my last guest on @nomadprep podcast. As sometimes happens the podcast interview ended up selling me and I became a student.

It’s a 6-week program to revamp your approach to productivity and time management. You do a time audit then seek to purge all activities that don’t get you closer to where you wanna be and focus on amplifying the ones that do.

It builds on a lot of the ideas of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and extends them with a framework to ensure everything you do is strategic. It has an elegant tiered approach where each level rolls up to support the next level. The most value I’m getting is that I can trace the thread of how what I’m working on this minute supports my highest purpose.

I’ve also been going through Michael Singer’s course “Living from a Place of Surrender.” I’m in week 7 of that and it’s very good as well. The notion of “surrender” isn’t natural to me- I’m a Taurus so I’m more inclined to charge ahead and make things work. But this course is an eye-opener explaining samskaras and how clinging and resisting creates blockages and surrender’s role in unblocking those.

Anyways weathering this pandemic from paradise has its +’s: the food here has been on point.

I’ve been helping the one and only @_rachelcrocker_ a bit with her biz. If you do any kind of online course or coaching she has an ingenious method for using FB messenger to generate leads.

In other news apparently there’s something called the “Eskimo toe dance.” Who knew?

We’re holding the first ever social distancing party for my b-day in a few weeks. Get in touch for deets if you’re in Canggu. And our first ever virtual Charity Makeover is this weekend. We have a few more spots avail. Check CharityMakeover.org to see if we can use your skills. (at Bali)

We spent week 7 here quarantined on the northern side of the island in a private villa near Tianyar. This was the view off my porch.

The sun glinting off the water every morning reminded me of when our family used to spend time on Coronado Island in San Diego growing up.

We had a lot of downtime as the internet up there was nearly non-existent. I re-read two books: “Illusions” by Richard Bach and “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Lots of creepy statues and ancient artifacts and roosters trudging around the yard all day.

We got good at recombinating the same canned ingredients with different sauces and doing dinners by candle light.

@helensimkins found the 3sqft of space on the property that had intermittent cell signal.

We improvised with coconuts one night and had a game of bocce ball at sunset.

Did I mention there were a lot of roosters?

@mattbowlesmaverick had me on his podcast for an unprecedented 3rd interview (that episode will be published tomorrow) to talk about our hurry-up offense to retool @charitymakeover_ to support all-virtual hackathons. Our hope is to be able to both provide some much needed assistance to some of the charities on the ropes right now from COVID-19 fallout but also give some meaningful work opportunities to people who are quarantined and sitting on their hands out of work. Ever the gracious host Matt fast-tracked this episode to get it live to help promote for our first ever virtual hackaton on Apr 11th.

We slept most nights with our doors open and woke up to this scene. It was a good week of decompression but we’re now back in Canggu for the fast reliable internet and I’m heads-down making the changes needed to our tech stack to enable what we’re trying to facilitate for these various causes. If you want to be involved in this effort from wherever you are, sign up on CharityMakeover.org – we can use all the help we can get and you can see what skills we still need on the website. Stay safe & healthy. ? (at Tianyar Barat)https://www.instagram.com/p/B-WAnxbn4Ap/?igshid=1d0a3axf3izta

We’re in day 3 of a self-imposed quarantine on the north coast of Bali and the most action we’ve seen is a bunch of chickens running around our yard (confirmed they do cross the road but we still don’t know why).

As Americans we have been inundated with messages from our government directing us to return home but IMO this country has less far to fall than the US in this crisis and I feel more confident in the Balinese’s capability to weather this storm. We are here in this tropical paradise for now until the situation demands otherwise.

It’s time to unplug and unwind as a society. Wednesday is the Balinese holiday called Nyepi, which is like Yom Kippur where all power is cut and it’s a 24-hour window of downtime. COVID is forcing this holiday at a global scale.

As nomads our situation is largely unaffected. I recognize we are fortunate in that regard and most of the world is facing an incredibly difficult time.

I highly recommend ordering a TRX as a way to stay in shape at home. @crispypelican introduced me to this device on @remoteyear and I’ve done it weekly ever since. It’s a fantastic way to have a home gym.

When one door closes another opens… If you’re like many you’re on an inward journey during this time. I recommend adding this book on Stoicism – I found it to be incredibly beneficial grid7.co/goodlife

@benlakoff and I are scrambling to retool @CharityMakeover_ and transition from physical hackathons to virtual hackatons so we can play a small part in providing much-needed aid to the non-profits which are on the ropes right now. Apr 11th is the next event.

@helensimkins and I have been holding down the fort but @nomaddennis and @travelinglifestyle just arrived and we have a little @nomadcruise commune now.

This is going to be a shitty week for a lot of people. Healthcare workers are the 911 firefighters of today. Please listen to this interview with a British doc: grid7.co/DrJack

The world done changed this last week… still wrapping my head around how fast this COVID-19 thing has mushroomed into a pandemic.

A week ago Christina, Helen and I were munching JFC (yes it’s KFC but one louder) on the way to…

a remote part of the island to capture footage for @east_bali_poverty_project and what we’re doing for them via @charitymakeover_

We got to meet their students…

and see a part of Bali I had not yet experienced.

EBPP is doing amazing work in the jungle. They have a for-profit arm building bamboo bikes and the latest is this entirely-bamboo wheelchair they’ve put together. The proceeds from the sales of these items go to fund their non-profit effort that is educating youth and providing toilets and clean water to rural villages nearby. It’s an amazing operation and we were very fortunate to see it firsthand.

We have refined the CM format and did a better job ramping up with team leader engagement leading into the weekend event. We threw our biggest ever Charity Makeover on Saturday with a total of 32 volunteers supporting 6 different charities with workers spanning 5 different timezones. I have not had the chance to comb through all the assets developed but I am incredibly proud of the effort and energy of the volunteers this weekend. Thanks to our sponsors, mentors, the @canggucamp308 venue and everyone who mobilized to make this work.

Guys, don’t worry. I’m still crushing desserts in spite of the virus. I have a theory I’m testing now that it avoids chocolate cake. I will report back on how this pans out.

Nothing changes for me gym-wise. My gym has been this tree since I got here.

And long-time friends will be happy to know that not even a pandemic can stop The Tierney 51st St. Patty’s Party in Phoenix.

Be safe y’all. I don’t have answers but I know for the first time in a long while the world is rallying as one around this common enemy. Turn the media off, be with loved ones and take care of each other. We are all in this struggle together. (at Canggu)https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zHpblHufJ/?igshid=1u65ga0amcswz

Can’t believe we’ve been here a month already… A group of us went to a different water park on Saturday.

This is not me hahah.

This is more my speed. This place is a giant circular lake with a cable system running above it that tows you around and lets you wakeboard, kneeboard, waterski and/or drags you through the water when you fail to let go of the handle.

Prior to that I took advantage of the alternative healing scene here and had my first “live blood analysis” to see how healthy I really am. So crazy to see the cosmos of all the little microbes moving around inside of one drop of blood… one of those moments of zoom in via microscope to think about that universe then zoom out with a telescope and realize how incredibly vast the actual universe is. We’re the little microbes in someone else’s plasma basically hahaha? ? We made the most out of a visa run and I got to have an incredible lunch with one of my favorite people in a magical place. I’m taking Nikki through “Start With Why” – this is one of the most powerful exercises I believe one can undertake. If there’s something that can yield a higher return in terms of being a force multiplier for one’s own impact, I have yet to find it.

We went to a villa party on Sunday in a place that could be on MTV Cribs. Unbelievable what you can get here for $1k/mo.

Ben and I are now in full-on attack mode with @charitymakeover_ #7 approaching this weekend. We have a sellout event of 30 confirmed volunteers for this one serving 5 charities making it our biggest event to date. We also should be having a nice little PR piece hit this week which will give us a stress test of the nocode application we recently deployed. Fingers crossed it weathers the impending PR storm.

Our workdays are punctuated by the occasional Balinese parade by the workspace.

This place continues to impress. I’m a big fan of Bali at this point and can for sure envision making this a regular stop on the yearly global circuit.